A Stillness at Appomattox: The Army of the Potomac Trilogy

by Bruce Catton

  With that belief Abraham Lincoln himself felt a certain agreement. On August 23 he had somewhat mysteriously asked members of his cabinet to sign a curiously folded paper, which he then tucked away in his desk. None of the men who signed knew what was in the paper. If they had known they would have gabbled and popped their eyes, for in Lincoln’s handwriting it contained this statement:

  “This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the President-elect as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he cannot possibly save it afterward.”

  A pessimistic appraisal, which since then has often been considered far too gloomy, hindsight having made clear many things not then apparent. But men in wartime have to operate without benefit of the backward glance, and in the summer of 1864 the war looked very much like a stalemate. Many men had died and there was much weariness, and as far as anyone could see the people had had about enough—of the Administration and of the Administration’s war.

  Lincoln was not the only pessimist. Horace Greeley, whose progress through the war years was a dizzy succession of swings from fatuous optimism to profoundest gloom, had recently written: “Mr. Lincoln is already beaten. He cannot be re-elected.” His pink cherubic face fringed by delicate light hair which always seemed to be ruffled by a faint breeze from never-never land, Greeley spoke for many Republican stalwarts when he wistfully hoped that Lincoln might somehow be replaced on the party ticket by Grant, or Butler, or Sherman. In such case, mused Greeley, “we could make a fight yet.” With other prominent Republicans, Greeley had been working on a scheme to hold a national convention of radical Republicans at the end of September, so as to concentrate support “on some candidate who commands the confidence of the country, even by a new nomination if necessary.” 1

  What was worrying Lincoln, of course, was not so much the prospect of his own defeat as the conviction that this defeat would mean loss of the war. In this judgment he may or may not have been correct. It is perhaps worthy of notice that one man who was very well qualified to form an expert opinion on the matter agreed with him thoroughly. When a visitor from Washington told General Grant that there was talk of running him for the presidency, Grant hit the arms of his camp chair with clenched fists and growled: “They can’t do it! They can’t compel me to do it!” Then he went on to show how Lincoln’s leadership looked from the special vantage point of the commanding general’s tent at City Point: “I consider it as important to the cause that he should be elected as that the army should be successful in the field.” 2

  Grant was the man who fought all-out, with few holds barred and with the annihilation of the opposing armies as the end to be sought. Yet Grant was quite able to see that although the war must be won on the battlefields it might very easily be lost back home—in Chicago, for example. The same thought had occurred to many others, including Jefferson Davis, and as a result a number of Confederate spies and military agents were converging on Chicago just now in the hope that they could stir up a great deal of trouble.

  The immediate magnet was the national convention of the Democratic party, convening on August 29 to nominate a candidate to run against Lincoln. Broadly speaking, this convention was bringing together practically everybody who disliked the way the war was being run, with the single exception of the dissident Republicans who felt that Lincoln was not tough enough. Among the assembling Democrats were stout Unionists who opposed the forcible abolition of slavery and the reduction of states’ rights; among them, also, were others who wanted only to have the war end—with a Union victory if possible, without it if necessary. And there were also men who saw the war consuming precious freedoms and creating tyranny, who blended extreme political partisanship with blind fury against the war party and who at least believed that they were ready to strike back without caring much what weapon they used.

  So the waters in Chicago were very muddy, and to the Confederate government it seemed likely that they might offer good fishing.

  For many months the Confederacy had been getting ready to exploit just this kind of situation. It had assembled a large number of operatives in Toronto under the general leadership of Colonel Jacob Thompson, who bore the vague title of Special Commissioner of the Confederate States Government in Canada and who possessed a letter from Jefferson Davis guardedly instructing him “to carry out the instructions you have received from me verbally in such manner as shall seem most likely to conduce to the furtherance of the interests of the Confederate States of America.” Thompson’s people were trying to do a little bit of everything. Early in the summer they had put out peace feelers, briefly hoodwinking none other than Horace Greeley himself, and although nothing much came of this venture the apparatus was hard at work on many other projects, most of them involving some form of sabotage in the Northern states.

  Thompson had a wild, devil-may-care crowd at his command. One of the most effective was a slim, black-haired, almost effeminate-looking Kentuckian named Thomas H. Hines, formerly a captain in John Hunt Morgan’s cavalry—the man, in fact, who had engineered Morgan’s spectacular and still mysterious escape from the Ohio penitentiary a year earlier. Hines was very tough indeed, and he had been sent to Canada from Richmond immediately after the Dahlgren raid, his mission being to round up all escaped Confederate prisoners of war who could find their way north of the border and to carry out with them “any fair and appropriate enterprises of war against our enemies” that might occur to him.

  The ideas these men had ranged all the way from stirring up draft riots in the Middle West to the burning of Northern cities, the capture of Northern prison camps, and the seizure of U.S.S. Michigan, the Navy’s warship which patrolled the Great Lakes. To a certain extent their program was frankly terroristic, and the papers which supposedly had been found on Colonel Dahlgren’s body calling for the burning and sacking of Richmond were often mentioned as full justification for such a program.3

  Colonel Thompson was an experienced politician well fitted for his shadowy role, and in Captain Hines he had as cool and capable a behind-the-lines operator as any fifth columnist could wish to have. Yet the results which these men obtained, from first to last, add up to nothing much more than a series of petty annoyances. Many of their operatives seem to have looked on the whole program as a glorified Tom Sawyer lark, with the sheer fun of conspiring and risking their necks offering a welcome outlet for restless spirits bored by the routine of ordinary army life. The whole operation was so effectively watched by Union spies that it had little chance to accomplish anything very sensational.

  The really crippling thing, however, was that Thompson and Hines and everybody else made the same mistake which a number of good Republicans and Union generals were forever making: when they looked upon the vast body of supposedly militant Northern Copperheads, they took them seriously.

  The Copperheads talked and at times acted as if they had both the means and the will to revolt against the Lincoln government, and they had grandiose plans for detaching from the Union various northwestern states and setting up a new confederacy actively friendly to the South. Their action arm was a mildly secret organization known as the Sons of Liberty, and their prophet was the famous Clement Laird Vallandigham, the former Ohio congressman whom Burnside in an excess of zeal had arrested in 1863 for seditious speechmaking and who had been rustled across the fighting lines and given to the Confederacy. Vallandigham had visited Richmond and had talked with government people there. Then he had flitted north to Canada, and in June of 1864 Captain Hines met him at Windsor, across the river from Detroit. Vallandigham talked largely about the size and power of the Sons of Liberty. They had 85,000 members in Illinois, he told Hines, 50,000 in Indiana, and 40,000 in Ohio, and with such an organization it seemed likely that a great deal could be done.4

  Soon after this Vallandigham donned a false beard and sm
uggled himself across the river, going thence to Ohio, dropping the beard, and beginning to make speeches. (The Lincoln government carefully looked the other way, figuring that as long as it did not officially know that Vallandigham had returned it would not have to make a martyr out of him all over again by re-arresting him.) In his speeches, Vallandigham expressed a vague menace. He warned the Lincoln tyranny that “there is a vast multitude, a host whom they cannot number, bound together by the strongest and holiest ties, to defend, by whatever means the exigencies of the times shall demand, their natural and constitutional rights as freemen, at all hazards and to the last extremity.” At the end of August he went to Chicago to take part in the Democratic convention.

  Captain Hines and sixty of his boys were in Chicago, too, dressed in civilian clothes and carrying revolvers. They had money and they knew where there were more weapons, and they had had a series of annoying, protracted, but apparently fruitful conferences with Copperhead leaders looking toward direct action. The modest Federal garrison in Chicago had recently been increased, and there were Demmocrats who felt that this could only have been done for the purpose of suppressing their convention and thereby ending the last of America’s civil rights. County chairmen of the Sons of Liberty, accordingly, had been notified to alert their members and stand by to strike a blow for freedom, and the leadership assured Hines that they were “sure of a general uprising which will result in a glorious success.”

  Hines, meanwhile, reflected that there were 5,000 perfectly good Confederate soldiers locked up at Camp Douglas, near Chicago, and 7,000 more in another prison camp at Rock Island. He appears to have hoped that the Copperheads would create enough trouble and confusion so that those prison camps could be seized and the prisoners released and armed. Then, with 12,000 good troops loose in northern Illinois, he could make trouble for the Yankees on a really impressive scale.5

  Unfortunately, as the time for action came closer the leaders of the Sons of Liberty grew more and more nervous. Talking nobly about taking up arms for the constitutional rights of free men was all very wen, as long as it was just talk. The trouble was that this quiet, blue-eyed Kentuckian was in deadly earnest and so were the men he had with him, and they proposed to turn this talk into action in which many Sons of Liberty would probably get shot, with the gallows looming large in the background for those whom the bullets missed. Copperhead leadership began to have second thoughts, and it hedged and temporized, grossly exaggerating the number of Federal troops present in Chicago and dwelling long on the probability of failure.

  By convention time, the Confederates could see that the Sons of Liberty simply were not going to rise in any substantial number. Disgustedly, Hines made a final proposal: if as many as 500 armed Copperheads would come together he could at least capture one of the prison camps, and he would play it alone from then on in. There were more conferences, more shiverings and headshakings—and, at last, the Confederates had to slip back to Canada, with nothing accomplished. The Copperheads could deplore and conspire and denounce, but they would not fight and the real fighting men whom the Confederacy had sent to Chicago could do nothing with them. Men who thought themselves bold had had to confront men who really were bold, and the meeting gave them a permanent scare.6

  This fiasco was the surface indication that a crisis had at last been met and passed. The North might be divided by bitter passions and half paralyzed by the numbness brought on by a long war, but the nightmare that had been dimly visible in the background for two years was at last fading out. Whatever happened, it was now certain that the war would not be lost because of revolt at home. The attempt to crush secession would not fail because of a second secession.

  Vallandigham might roam Chicago, conferring with leaders and orating to street-corner crowds, forcing the Democratic convention to adopt a platform deploring the “failure” of the war and calling for “immediate efforts” to end all hostilities. In the end there was just going to be another presidential election, not an armed uprising. The Chicago gathering remained an ordinary political convention, and it made an ordinary political bet—that general war weariness and discontent over a military stalemate could be made to add up to a majority at the polls.

  In making this bet the convention played it both ways. It adopted the Vallandigham peace plank, to pull in all of the people who were tired of war or who had not believed in war in the first place; then, for its presidential candidate, it nominated a soldier—George B. McClellan, the enduring hero of the enlisted man in the Army of the Potomac, a leader whom Democratic orthodoxy considered a military genius unfairly treated by petty politicians in Washington.

  Immediately after this, the roof fell in.

  To begin with, McClellan would not stay hitched. On reflection he found the platform altogether too much to swallow. Accepting the nomination, he quietly but firmly turned the peace pledge inside out, saying that he construed it as a mandate to carry the war through to victory and remarking that to do anything less than insist on the triumph of the Union cause would be to betray the heroic soldiers whom he had led in battle.

  Worst yet, William Tecumseh Sherman captured Atlanta.

  Sherman had moved against Joe Johnston’s Confederate army the same day Grant crossed the Rapidan. From the distant North his campaign had looked no more like a success than the one in Virginia. If it had not brought so many casualties, it had seemed no more effective at ending Rebel resistance. Wise old Joe Johnston, sparring and side-stepping and shifting back, had a very clear understanding of the home-front politics behind the armies. His whole plan had been to keep Sherman from forcing a showdown until after the election, on the theory that victory postponed so long would look to the people up North like victory lost forever, and his strategy had been much more effective than his own government could realize. To President Davis, Johnston’s course had seemed like sheer faintheartedness, and he had at last dismissed Johnston and put slugging John B. Hood in his place. Hood had gone in and slugged, and Sherman’s army had more slugging power—so now, with the Democrats betting the election on the thesis that the war effort was a flat failure, decisive success had at last been won.

  First Sherman, then Sheridan: and in the middle of September Grant quietly went up to the Valley and had a talk with Sheridan, the two men walking back and forth across a little field, Sheridan gesturing with nervous hands, Grant chewing a cigar and looking at the ground. A leathery Vermont sergeant leaned against a rail fence, watching them, and he looked moodily at Grant’s stoop-shouldered figure.

  “I hate to see that old cuss around,” said the sergeant at last. “When that old cuss is around there’s sure to be a big fight on hand.” 7

  The sergeant was quite right. The old cuss had been growing impatient and he wanted action. Sheridan had a big advantage over Early in numbers, and Grant believed that he ought to be able to move to the Valley Pike somewhere below Winchester, get south of the Rebel army, and at last do what Grant had demanded two months earlier—follow it to the death. Early had his army in position behind Opequon Creek, covering Winchester, and Sheridan felt that it was going to be hard to get at him. Still, he had held this command for six weeks now, the shakedown period was about over, and it was time for action.

  So Grant and Sheridan finished their talk and Grant went back to City Point, and at two o’clock on the morning of September 19 Wilson’s cavalry trotted down to one of the fords of the Opequon, went spattering across the shallows, drove in the Rebel outposts, and rode on to feel the main Southern defensive line, horse artillery banging away hard, dismounted troopers laying down a sharp fire from repeating carbines.

  The Opequon fords lay perhaps six miles east of Winchester, and the VI Corps came over the water at dawn, the sun coming up behind their backs, dirty smoke piling up in the gray sky to the west. The veterans looked and listened, and one of them wrote that they “heard that sound which I believe strikes a chill through the bravest man that lives, and causes him to feel that his heart is sinking
down, down till it seems to drop into his boots. I mean the dull rustling of air which is hardly more than a vibration, but which to the experienced listener betokens artillery firing at a distance. When one expects soon to join in the exercise, that signal is not inspiriting.”8

  According to Sheridan’s battle orders the VI Corps was to come up on the heels of Wilson’s cavalry, with Emory’s and Crook’s men close behind and the rest of the cavalry swinging in a half circle to come down on Winchester from the north. Speedy movement was essential. Early had scattered his forces, and most of his men were spread out somewhere between Winchester and Martinsburg. Perhaps a third of his infantry, supported by artillery and cavalry, was posted in the lines east of Winchester covering the road from the Opequon. If that infantry force could be smashed quickly, Early’s troops north of town could be cut off and his army could be destroyed piecemeal. So the VI Corps pressed along and the offensive was under way at last.

  Unfortunately, it was not under way very fast. Orders had gone awry somehow and there was an infernal traffic tie-up, and the army moved at a crawl. The road led up the length of a narrow valley, and in some way the whole baggage and supply train of the VI Corps, which was supposed to be sidetracked east of the creek, inserted itself into the line of march right behind the leading infantry divisions, with corps artillery behind it and all the rest of the army to follow. The infantry column thus was cut in half by miles of slow-moving wagons, ambulances, caissons, battery forges, and other lumbering vehicles, and the cumbersome procession could neither be parked by the roadside nor turned around and sent back, because road and valley were too narrow.

  The foot soldiers left the road and tried to pass this tangle, but they found themselves scrambling along steep hillsides, through trees and underbrush, creeping up toward the fight at a rate not much better than a mile an hour. The slopes were clogged, as a man in the XIX Corps remembered, with “the hundreds of men who belong to an army but never fight—the cooks, the officers’ servants, the hospital gangs, the quartermaster’s people, the ‘present sick’ and the habitual skulkers”—not to mention various regiments of cavalry which had been told to wait by the road and let the infantry advance.9